


i've known you all my life (i worship the ground you walk upon)

by sharksharp (unconventionaled)



Category: Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Gen, Vignette, and no archive warnings apply, from pre-canon through the campania arc, i'm obsessed with these children, is this even a kuroshitsuji fic anymore??, there's like hardly any violence or child abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-18
Updated: 2016-03-18
Packaged: 2018-05-27 11:07:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6282178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unconventionaled/pseuds/sharksharp
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>she loves him so much it'll kill her (if his hate doesn't kill him first)</p>
            </blockquote>





	i've known you all my life (i worship the ground you walk upon)

**Author's Note:**

> this fic brought to you by the songs holy(pvris) and isaac(bear's den)
> 
> also by my enduring love of elizabeth ethel cordelia midford i will defend her to the death

Lizzy imagines she has loved Ciel from the beginning of everything. She cannot remember a time when she did not love him. It seems inconceivable that such a time could have existed. From the moment her soul came into being, the faintest spark of light in a dark universe, his was the twin brightness she cleaved to. It must be so, for she cannot imagine an ache fiercer or a grace higher than that she knows for Ciel. 

Even in the creche, the moment her infant body was placed beside his she knows with the certainty of the devout she must have felt the universe realign. Her father tells her she cried when she first met him, and that set him to crying too, but Lizzy cannot blame her child self. It must have been a terrible thing to bear witness to the creaking gears of the world, shifting beyond word and voice around Ciel's axis.

By his side, she was always soft. It was easy to be soft, with someone as gentle as Ciel. Even when she got excitable, seized his hand and dragged him to her room to show him her toys, the ones he'd seen before but always settled into her explanations of as happily as if it was the first time, he never fussed at her roughness, was never rough back. She'd heard her parents call him frail, when they thought she wasn't listening, but he never seemed frail to her. Lizzy wasn't exactly sure what frail meant, just that it was the reason Ciel's parents scooped him up when they ran around outside too much, even though he was just fine. He was better than fine. He peeked over the slope of his father's shoulder and waved at her, grinning as madly as when she chased him through the long grass. He was the best thing she knew.

For that smile, she had to take up a sword that burnt blisters into her palm and weighed on her arm against the time she would need to protect him. Her mother took her in her arms and wiped away her frustration, told her she would have to be braver, stronger, better, because one day Ciel would need her to be more than his best friend, more than his wife. The road stretching before them both was a dark one, darker than any night she'd ever feared. To get through it, her mother told her, she would need to be Ciel's light.

Lizzy thought her mother was wrong. Her mother had never been wrong, but surely Lizzy, who was to be Ciel's wife, whose soul ran twin to his, ought to know better than anyone. Ciel _was_ light, and Lizzy only thrall to his brightness.

Mothers know best.

\--

At seven, she learned the meaning of the word frail. He fell, with little sound and less warning, on the endless lawn of the Phantomhive estate. One second he was behind her, laughing the in chase, the next she was alone. She turned back to find him gone, no more than the tiniest spot of white held in the grasping fingers of grass, his chest stuttering and shaking like he'd never breathe again. 

Uncomprehending terror blasted her mind clear, carved out the details of those memories so when she looks back on them she knows only that she was screaming, screaming and screaming and that at some point she must have stopped, because when she looked again on Ciel he was whiteness in a sea of white, thin and pale and swallowed by his sheets. She stood by his bedside with her hands folded in front of her, her mother's hand on her shoulder and thought _this must be what it's like to attend a funeral._ She remembers the guilt clearly, the confusion, that she could neither protect him nor be protected by him.

But she knows now what it is to bury her heart. Ciel's parents' caskets were as white as a childhood bed, their faces covered in deference to the ruin of fire that washed over them, pulled them under. If Ciel was to be buried, would he not too be shrouded in white, just a thin pale face in a pall of purity?

\--

The fire changed nothing. The fire changed everything. The Ciel who returned to her shared only the glittering blue of his remaining exposed eye with the Ciel who left her. Even the tenor of his gaze had cracked, turning from the warm blue of summer to the depthless blue of ice. He turned that eye on her and froze her joy in her chest, dropped ice in her veins even as she wrapped her arms around him and tried to hold him together, her face buried in his shoulder. If she could just hide there long enough, when she pulled away she would be holding Ciel, _her_ Ciel, back from the dead to give her a second chance where she failed. This time she'd do better, fight harder, hold tighter to that light she'd been born to mirror such that no sweeping darkness could ever again take it away.

When she again met Ciel's gaze, she saw no light at all. And when he stepped back towards his estate, a towering palace as if untouched by flame, hers was not the body beside him.

Ciel reappeared with a shadow twice his own size haunting his every step, black and consuming as a starless night. He called him Sebastian, called him his butler, but Lizzy saw only a haunting. She imagined that in crawling from his grave, something must have latched onto Ciel's heel and come with him, some scrap of darkness that fashioned itself into the shape of a man and named itself for a dead dog - a dead _dog_ \- that he should never forget death had marked him.

This Ciel never smiled, never laughed. He looked on her as a stranger, infinitely blue and infinitely cold and infinitely far away. That must be part of the exchange as well. If Lizzy dug up Ciel's empty grave with her bare hands, pawed ignobly through the barren cask they laid down in his name, would she find some small scrap of light she could carry back to him and stitch into his soul that he might once again shine? For Ciel, she would fill her hands with dirt. For Ciel she would do anything.

\--

Still Lizzy loved him. She held out her hand to the foreigner in her beloved Ciel's skin and found in herself a well of love as bottomless as his indifference. There had to be something wrong with her, she thought, when they were eleven and Ciel was nigh-inaccessible, face turned into the cloaking expanse of his butler. He looked on her as empty as though she was not there and still her world rent around him, made him the sun at the heart of her universe. 

At least once a month, she decided, she would visit him. Even if only for a few minutes, even if he was too busy to entertain her for more than a few minutes. Because he was the Earl of Phantomhive now, not just Ciel, and he was busy, he had responsibilities. If she showed up without notice, then there was no reason to feel hollow if he had no time. It wasn't her, it was just his life now. 

The last few minutes of the ride to the estate, though, she always grieved the world as it was before. When Ciel ran to greet her no matter what and she nearly knocked him over flinging herself from the carriage. She stared in the mirror trying to see the difference, but she looked the same as she did then, save with Ciel so far out of reach she met his eye and wondered if she could even see him at all through the thick black sac that encased him, deflected her searching gaze politely and civilly.

If she punched Sebastian in the stomach (she considered his eye and dismissed it with a surge of directionless fury when she realized she couldn't reach) would Ciel even take her side? When they thought she wasn't looking they excluded the rest of the world perfectly, established in a single shared glance a space large enough only for two. She loved Ciel so much she thought she would be sick on it, and he barely deigned to look at her. Did he think of her at all, she wondered. Did he know she fractured her sleep again and again, dreaming of his face still and white and swallowed by dirt? 

\--

She once visited the estate to find it empty, and the place in her heart that had lain hollow for years clenched down on its own vacancy. She felt too clearly the echoing of her own pulse in her shaking chest as the sightless windows stared judgment upon her, each one dark, filled not by flame but not at all. For long minutes, she stared out the window of her carriage, unwelcomed, her hand shivering on the door latch, trying to convince herself that if she entered she would not find all laid to waste, every memory after Ciel's tenth birthday ravaged by death's unforgiving hand. 

Finnian's appearance, after a short, cold eternity, brought little light back to the world. He assured her only that Ciel was _out_ , that she was welcome to stay until he returned if she wanted. She did want. Her unmoored heart pitched around her chest, unable to settle without the certainty that Ciel was alive, that that blackness which so intimately dogged him had not yet swallowed him whole.

In the middle of the night Lizzy crept barefoot from her bed, one of Ciel's nightshirts swirling around her and cutting off mid-thigh, a length unconscionable for a lady. Her hair hung unbound, unbrushed and unbraided. She was too old for this behavior, too old to be caught creeping indecently through the dark like a child, too old to guide herself by fingertips against the wall. It felt like it had never known the touch of fire.

Like the black thing she'd always suspected him of being, Sebastian walked out of the dark unfettered, his eyes a glitter of moonlight. Ciel hung limp in his arms, his face still and white.

She remembers that she couldn't scream, for a moment couldn't draw breath past the dry fit of Sebastian's glove over her mouth, trapping her wordless cry stillborn in her lungs.

"Lady Elizabeth." 

Lizzy swallowed. Sebastian removed his hand.

"My apologies, but the young master is sleeping." He spoke low, against her ear. "He's had a trying day. I ask that you refrain from waking him."

In the vast hall of the Phantomhive estate, wading through darkness all but undressed, Lizzy felt less like a lady and more like a girl caught awake past her bedtime, awaiting censure. She curled her toes protectively beneath her foot. She wanted to ask to see Ciel to his bed, to know that he was safe and secure here. It was her right as his wife, her responsibility, to care for her husband. A hole to match her heart gnawed its way through her stomach.

"Don't worry, my lady." 

Lizzy startled, guilty. "I'm not-"

"I'll take care of him for you."

In the vast, darkened hall of the Phantomhive estate, with Ciel cradled in his arms, Sebastian didn't look so much like a torment wrenched from the ground as a man, as someone who protected Ciel when she could not. Whatever they'd done, he'd returned Ciel to her safe. In the few years she'd known Sebastian, never had Ciel been harmed in her absence. One day, she would be the Countess Phantomhive, wife of the Queen's Watchdog, and she would never have to leave his side. But not quite yet. Not tonight.

She held out her hand, so easily smothered by Sebastian's, and shook like she was holding a sword. "You'd better."

Sebastian smiled like he'd caught moonlight in his teeth.

\--

By fourteen she thinks she has mastered it, this love without respite, this burden of guesswork as she tries to pull the Earl of Phantomhive back to her where he can just be Ciel, where she can find common ground with the man she loves. She combs through every memory relentlessly looking for something, anything to shore her up against the next time, that she can do better, be stronger, make him smile more broadly. At times, she thinks she has caught it, the flash of his eye like a falling star over the smile he lends only to her. Beautiful, she thinks. Ciel is the most beautiful person in the universe. She would give everything she is time and time again to see him smile like that.

But then he bridles and blisters and she has lost the plot again, back to running in circles, knocking on every door of his fortress and hoping one day she will find the right way in. If this is to be the rest of her life, grasping every thread she can that might make Ciel smile, holding his heart while he holds the center, she thinks she can bear it. She thinks she would gladly throw herself on this sharpest sword for him. There is no happiness brighter than Ciel's. No matter what swollen, corpse-strewn earth she must kneel in to draw it back to him, she welcomes the task. This is what it is to love.

\--

He turns a gun on her and she sees something in him she wishes she could take back. It's one thing to know she loves someone deadly and another to know he has blood on his hands (if she moves wrong, it could be hers). She never knew he carried a pistol. She never knew he holds a gun like this, perfectly sure and steady, his finger so close to the trigger. 

She has known who he is from the start, known that for England and the Queen he blackens himself, stains his own hands that the world may be cleaner, but only now does she appreciate that he shields her from it. Whatever he comes home from, the Earl of Phantomhive, he washes his hands and smiles for her. He takes on the weight of being everything. She wants to be everything for him, wants to be wife and friend and protector and North Star, bright enough that he can always find his way home.

It doesn't cost so much, then, to draw swords on his behalf, even if it means he will never see her the same again, even if he will never love her the way she loves him, because this is what she's spent every year since their rebirth preparing for. She will fight for him. To the very end, until the infinite blackness of the universe swallows the sun and there is nothing left standing in the darkness. Even if he cannot love her, with her hands as stained as his, she cannot help but love him. Whatever it takes, she will protect him. No matter who she must become. That is what love is.

\--

Low-heeled shoes. Mother's teachings. A sword to protect you. 

These are the nice things my current self is made of.

**Author's Note:**

> catch me choosing a weird tense and then spending more time second-guessing it than actually writing


End file.
